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One, Two, Many - Language Shapes Thought
Chuck1318 writes "The Piraha tribe in the Amazon has only three words used in counting, that mean one, two, and many. A psychologist testing them has found that they are unable to accurately perform tasks involving quantities as few as four or five. He says that this shows that, at least for numbers, language shapes and limits how people can think." I can't help but be reminded of the gully dwarves from Dragonlance when reading this.
"We have it...on the authority of African explorers that many Hottentot tribes do not have in their vocabulary the names for numbers larger than three. Ask a native down there how many sons he has or how many enemies he has slain, and if the number is more than three, he will answer 'many.'"
[ George Gamow, "One, Two, Three...Infinity" 1953 ]
my computer can only count to one, that never stopped it
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
I always suspected that the native name of your town, and the local features affected your accent (explains Liverpool and Stoke)
Perhaps they are not used to takss involving more than 3 items because usually it goes like this:
Hunt
Kill
Eat
Bang over head
Shag it
Sleep
Now I think some of thier ways of going about business is even more refined than ours.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Please no more replies I just can't keep track of them all.
Trolls are usually thought to be so stupid they can count only up to 4. [...]
In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three... many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don't realize that many can be a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS.
- Men at Arms
This idea has been around for a while, originally, insofar as I know, called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It's neat to see it strongly confirmed in some capacity, though.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this margin is too small to contain.
Terry Pratchett: Men at Arms, page 132, footnote:
"In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three...many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don't realize that many can be a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS.
In fact certain Inca tribes worshipped the zero, leading to the inevitable question, Is nothing sacred?
They weren't tested for mathematical skills, they
were tested for practical skills involving
quantities of items or events larger than 3.
sigs are hazardous to your health
Language is the uniting factor in society because it is the basis for complex thought (just try to plan out your day while thinking abstractly); different languages, and dialects, have different grammatical structures that lead thought patterns to be constructed in different ways. Even for me, with German as a second language, I still notice that when i am in Germany (currently i Berlin), and think in German I compose thoughts and analyze my environment differently.
:)
I can only imagine that one in a completely different society would have a very different thought pattern. The common roots of Western languages indicates a similarity in thought, and people who learn foreign languages are far more adept at understanding and integrating with that society.
Similarily, in computer languages different grammatical structures lead different programmers to analyze and solve problems differently: i.e. functional vs imperative. Add the context-sensitive nature of human languages, and this becomes substantially more complex.
Ok, thats longer than my normal post, but this is a really interesting topic
Language in this case has certainly limited their ability to express concepts. Their brains, however, will still recognize the existence of four or five things. Unfortunatly the limitations on their language will keep them from expressing verbally that knowledge. It could even bar their comprehensive abilities.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
> Or the trolls in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books
Finally, a
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
1. Locate sub-average intelligent slashdot poster
2. Leave aformentioned slashdot poster in amazonian jungle with same level of technology as amazonian tribe s/he ridiculed.
3. Wait for slashdot poster to die in hostile environment which ridiculed tribe thrives in
4. Collect his/her life insurance
5. Profit!!
You see, in American English, you have only one word for Indians, unlike in other languages where they can actually tell the difference between Native Americans and the people who invented the decimal system, grammar, and many other useful things, like "Karma".
The article states he wasn't testing them for mathematical skills--just their ability to remember four or five items, or remember how many lines were on a piece of paper. They couldn't do these things accurately in quantities greater than three. It is surprising. I'd think that just visually people of any language could group items up to six at least.
So in essense this seem to support the Sappir-Worph hypothesis (http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html) that the language strongly affect our ability to think.
This makes one wonder if a another language would give us the ability to better reason about other things. Would we be smarter if we had a better language in which to think?
There is an artifical language called lojban (http://www.lojban.org/) based on predicate logic but which is meant to be used as other "real" languages (compare with eg. esperanto, interlingua and swahili). The question is, would native speakers of lojban be better a rational thought? As far as I know there are no native speakers of lojban but what would happend if I raised my (hypothethical) children to speak if from birth?
Mathias
Many fluently multilingual people will tell you that they are a slightly different person when they speak a different language.
I'm fluent in English and Japanese, and I can attest to this. In fact, there have been occasions when I was out of touch from Japanese speakers for a long time, and I began to miss my "Japanese self" because it hadn't had a chance to surface for so long.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
If this tribe calculated 0, 1, 2, many, many 1, many 2 or something like it there would be no trouble. Just confusing for base 10 users.
But it seems this tribe doesn't have/need the concept of higher numbers.
What I would like to know if they understand the concept of zero. The invention of 0 is a usually considered a pretty big step in western culture and one arabs like to claim as their contribution to the world. If this tribe wich can only count to 2 understands 0 then it would make an intresting find.
They may not have a need to count higher numbers but me thinks it is very important to know the difference between 1 fish and 0 fish.
What may also be intresting is that if you need language to count and animals can count does that mean that all animals that can count have a language. And not just a language of "food" "danger" "sex" but a language with "1" "2" "3" etc?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm not a psychologist, but to me there's nothing earth-shattering here. There are other instances of people who have words for a wide variety of shades of green (that normal Americans can't differentiate) but who use the same word for the colors we call orange and red.
But, even knowing that, is anything so dramatic going on? "Western" people with the proper training and experience could tell the difference at a glance between a screen full of C programming and a screen full of FORTRAN. My grandmother would struggle with that task. It would just all look like gibberish to her. Likewise, someone experienced in wine tasting can describe in detail the differences between two wines most of the rest us couldn't even tell apart.
A lot of what's necessary (or at least very helpful) in learning about programming or wines is the specialized language. When I'm told that the difference between two wines is that one is "fruitier" than the other, I've got something to look for. The nebulous and complex experience of tasting wine is brought into my understanding a little because I can now use a word to identify a part of what I'm sensing.
My point is, the idea that language affects how we think and what we perceive is not really all that novel.
You know what they say, "In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is king."
668.5
The idea that your language determines the way you see the world (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has been around for many decades, and has been the subject of many experiments and much discussion. Language has generally not been shown to affect perception or thought, altho there are occasional special cases where there does seem to be an mild effect.
Example #1: Different languages divide up the color space differently. For example, Russian divides the color space covered by the English word "blue" into two separate color terms. However, language doesn't appear to affect the way people perceive color. For example, when researchers ask informants to judge color chips as "same" or "different," there appears to be no effect at all from the division of color space in the informant's native language.
Example #2: Chinese doesn't have a way of marking counterfactual or hypothetical statements as some languages do. One researcher (Bloom) had speakers of English and of Chinese read the same story in their respective native languages, and the speakers of Chinese did in fact have trouble answering whether such-and-such really happened. Bloom took this as evidence that language strongly affects thought. But another researcher said that the problem was just a bad translation into Chinese, and repeated the experiment with a better translation. Now the Chinese speakers had no difficulty saying "Of course such-and-such didn't happen."
On the other hand, the tense/aspect system of Russian does appear to have an effect on the way that speakers evaluate the temporal relationships in non-linguistic pictures of events. So it is occasionally possible to tease out a case where language does seem to have an effect on non-linguistic thought.
In sum, a blanket statement that "language determines thought" is much too strong. Even if the finding of the article mentioned above is accurate, the weight of the evidence seems to be that these cases are the exception, not the rule.
BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow. That claim almost always gets trotted out in this kind of context. This is a kind of academic urban legend that just won't die. The linguist Geoff Pullum thoroughly debunked this whole fable some time back, and traced the series of misunderstandings and exaggerations which had given rise to it. In fact, it appears that Inuktitut has just two words for snow.
Samuel Delaney's classic SF book "Babel-17" explored how language shapes behavior. A clandenstine group who wanted assassins who wouldn't question what they were doing created an artificial language and raised children in it. The language had no word for "I" or "no". It was all commands, such as "You will do this." They had no way of saying "No, I won't.", because the concept didn't exist in the language. I recently re-read it after many years and it's still an incredible read.
For those (like me) who had never before heard of Gully Dwarves, here is an informative link that discusses their counting abilities.
Check out Chad's News
This is a very old theory in Linguistics, commonly known as the Whorfian hypothesis (look for Sapir-Whorf). It predates 1950; it dates from the 1920s.
It has been discredited many times, as believable as it sounds. It is however a fascinating story; B.L. Whorf was an amateur linguist who was professionally a insurance claims inspector specialising in fire-related claims. He noticed that several fires where started when workers through cigarette butts into drums that in English we call "empty", even though they contained invisible and explosive fumes. Whorf realised that the workers knew this technically, but he wondered if being forced to think of the drums as "empty" changed their view of the drum. He did lots of research on languages of central america, and came up with interesting theories because many of these languages (eg Hopi) appear to have very different verb tenses; Whorf proposed that this gave their speakers almost-Einstein-like views of time and space.
A numbers of tests have been down over the years. Some languages have only a few words for color, for example. However, experiments show that this does not impair speakers of these languages from differentiating different shades of colors.
Yes.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, however, even though long proven wrong, has shaped the thinking of a whole generation of people, including those in the feminist movement, proposing "politically correct" words (female forms e.g.) hoping that they would induce a new thinking.
Language may be a result of knowledge and cultural concepts, thus reflect it. But it does not shape it, because - and that's known as de Saussure's work - the word is not equal to the concept. Whether you call something a small feline animal or a cat, it's still the same entity that you are thinking of. Whether you call someone a nigger, an african american, a 'brother', a black person -- the name does force us to change our thinking. (It may prompt us to think about misconceptions, of course!)
Steven Pinker's book "The Language Instinct" is a good read.
Haven't read Feigenson's original article. But it seems painfully obvious to me that given all the other linguistic evidence, the Brazilian tribe might simply have established a culture of arithmetics that doesn't allow you to count more than two things.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I would have thought it was more along the lines of
"In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is burnt at the stake for being a witch."
The "strong" form of Sapir-Whorf, that the form of language directly impacts what kinds of thought are possible, is not taken too seriously anymore. But there are weaker forms of the hypothesis, that there is an infulence, that still seem reasonable given the evidence so far. Much like how a different programming language lends itself to different sorts of programming constructs.
The Kanka-Bono tribe amazingly have no words for basic concepts like "wireless router," "dual opteron server blade," and "network print server." When our team of researchers presented them with these items, they merely tried using them to break open coconuts. The obvious conclusion is that, since their amazingly primitive language lacks the words for these items, their tiny non-Caucasian brains are simply unable to form distinctions among such obviously diffferent objects. Thus the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was vindicated. Then they ate our Dell service rep. And there was much rejoicing.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Language follows culture, not vica-versa. When electronic mail arrived, we didn't run around flumoxed because there was no word for it. We invented a word. For a while, people were pretty bad with email, even though there was a word for it, because it's a difficult thing to understand. Then, after a few years, everybody "got" it.
I assume this is the same thing. Nomadic tribes don't deal with a lot of things, because everything they have they have to carry. So there's no need to count above two. If suddenly you ask a guy to keep track of four things, he's gonna have trouble: not because he doesn't have a word for it, but because he's going to have difficulty differentiating between the four things. It's no different than if I moved from driving a car to driving a semi trailer with no training. I'd get some of it, but important, non-intuitive concepts would be lost on me, and I'd probably crash. It's not because I don't have a word for them.
This is like the Inuit people and their umpteen words for snow. We outsiders can recognize the different types of snow with only a little practice, but since we don't get snow 8 months of the year, there's no need for it. English speakers understand foreign concepts like "esprit d'escalier" (the french term for all the cool things you wish you would have said when you leave somebody's house) or "bokeh" (the japanese term for the photographic effect that occurs with large aperatures in which the foreground is in sharp focus and the background is out of focus and fuzzy, thus drawing the eye towards the focus), even if we don't know what to call them.
It's experience that drives language, not vica versa -- althought the part of the brain that employees language is also responsible for the most critical human activity: symbolic logic.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
First, I am dubious as to the accuracy of the study involved. The article states that "The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top." The article does not, however, state how long the box had been displayed, whether or not the Pirahã had been told that the fish were significant before the box was removed, and whether or not it had been properly conveyed to the Pirahã that different quantities of fish in numbers greater than three were significantly distinct.
.org domain, I will select Americans for my sample study. The Pirahã may then show an American a box containing a fish and ask what species it is. I personally know little about species distinction in fish, especially those in Brazil, and would fail to answer the question correctly. The point is that it has never been necessary for me to have this information to function in my society. Would it be academic of the Pirahã, then, to assume I was less intelligent for not being able to recognize an Epen Nomin?
/-xáagahá/. If I were to answer the correct species of fish and fail to use that suffix, would it be correct for them to assume I was not confident of my answer?
;)
To contrast, let us imagine that the Pirahã are conducting a similar study on a member of another culture. As this site is of the
Additionally, the Pirahã have a phrase in their language which indicates a degree of certainty, usually applied at the end of a sentence:
My point here should be fairly obvious. We cannot assume that we know the critical details of the study based upon a web article which, between two columns of advertisements, still only takes two pages (on my monitor, at least).
Second, and more breifly, the assumption that counting capacity defines intelligence is inherently flawed. The Pirahã have no need for counting; this is not to say they are not capable of it. Most Americans don't need to know what a coral snake looks like or that touching the little yellow-and-black frog is a bad thing. This doesn't mean they couldn't learn.
In summary, while the study definitely presents an interesting idea, one must evaluate it critically before accepting it as fact. Mistakes can be made.
That was a lot more than I meant to type. Thanks for the time.
I read that and I was really surprised. I am a Polish speaker/reader and so is my wife. I left Poland at the age of four but my wife only did so four years ago. In fact to become competent in Polish I took two quarters of Polish at Uni. The other students were Russian/Slavic and linguistics concentrators. It was a very bizarre way of learning Polish I suppose, but before that I felt very inadequate about being illiterate and sounding like a four year old whenever I spoke Polish.
So what I know is that in Polish there are also two words for blue: niebieski and blekitni. (Okay so I had to strip-off the accents because slashcode did not like them.) They are light-blue and dark-blue respectively. (Really niebieski is related to the word for sky so you might think of this word as sky-blue, I do and that is what I meant earlier about learning Polish from a linguist probably was different from a native Polish speakers experience.)
Now you might think this is simple, well not really. Here is a translation of what happens in practice with some regularity. My wife says, "Bring me the blue one," where blue is the word for either light-blue or dark-blue depending on the color of the object. I oblige but then hear a response of, "No I said the blue one not the green one." Bizarre because notice I wrote blue and green. It is not like she said light-blue and I brought the dark-blue widget. Sometimes she claims I brought the purple thing instead. These exchanges are entirely in Polish because this what we speak predominantly at home.
Okay now I am not color-blind. For my work I need to pass a test every two years and in the report I always pass all of the tests, even those for which a certain percentage of people that are not typically considered color-blind would not pass. I can clearly distinguish between a wide spectrum of colors.
After a while of this my mother noticed it once so we did a little test with the family. My mother, father, uncle, aunt, and grandmother were all part of it. All of them had spent the majority of their lives in Poland and almost without fail they would agree with the colors that my wife gave to objects. Then we repeated the test with my brother and his girlfriend who except for a vacation had not spent any time in Poland. They agreed with me the majority of the time.
Now this test was not scientific in any way and it did involve alcohol because it happened during a family get-together, but I still think that native Polish speakers vs English speakers think of colors as different because of their languages. What I mean is that there are many shades of colors that are sort of between green and blue and others that are between green and purple and given a proper ambiguous color such as this Polish speakers will tend to identify it differently than English speakers.
So what I am trying to say after all of this is that the example of the Russian language having two words for blue is sort of a red herring. It is irrelevant to the real issues. In fact given two people that are not color blind, one a Russian and one an English speaker, they should not have any extra difficulty in being able to distinguish between color chips as being different or not. What I am saying is that they will think of the same color chip as a different color in their minds. Now this is subtle, and I tend to agree with the parent poster that it is a special case, but definitely an example of how language influences understanding and meaning. Here is a final true story to illustrate this idea.
My wife's favorite color is light-blue. Once I bought her a gift that was a light blue dress. When she got it she said that the dress was nice, but that, "Don't you know by now that I do not like the way I look in green?" Think about intend and effect in that example and you will see what I mean about language being important.
"This is one of those areas of study where a layman can have no idea of the absurd depth of literature available, or the sorts of ridiculous theories spawned, and yet still be able to say meaningful things because it's all pretty much been wanking."
Sorry, but that's just not the case. This happens to be my field - language is far more complicated than you might imagine. Linguistics, psycholinguistics, and visual cognition are not trivial just because you don't understand them on a serious level.
G